


Cracks in Blackout Curtains

by vega_voices



Series: Sleeps with Butterflies [46]
Category: CSI, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-03
Updated: 2013-10-03
Packaged: 2017-12-28 08:18:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,430
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/989816
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vega_voices/pseuds/vega_voices
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>He was close, too close, and she needed to pull away before their heads turned and their lips met and they went to a place that in a few hours they’d regret.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cracks in Blackout Curtains

**Title:** Cracks in Blackout Curtains  
 **Series:** [Sleeps with Butterflies](http://vega-voices.livejournal.com/tag/sleeps%20with%20butterflies)/The Crow and the Butterfly  
 **Author:** vegawriters  
 **Fandom:** CSI  
 **Pairing:** Grissom/Sara with some Greg/Sara UST  
 **Rating:** General  
 **Timeframe:** Early season 14, spanning through the first two episodes.  
 **A/N:** Please note, this is completely [](http://jazminebel.livejournal.com/profile)[**jazminebel**](http://jazminebel.livejournal.com/)’s fault. ;) This takes place in my [Sleeps with Butterflies](http://vega-voices.livejournal.com/tag/sleeps%20with%20butterflies) universe, but I suspect it needs to be its own series, encased in the SwB world.  
 **Disclaimer:** Sara Sidle, Gil Grissom, and Greg Sanders belong to CSI, CBS, and those powers that be. Per usual, I make not a cent from what I write.

 **Summary:** _He was close, too close, and she needed to pull away before their heads turned and their lips met and they went to a place that in a few hours they’d regret._

**_I never thought you'd slip away  
_** I guess I was just a little too late  
~Shinedown: _The Crow and the Butterfly_

Coffee woke her. Not the smell but the gurgle of the pot. Wrapping a tattered blue sweater around her shoulders, Sara walked to the edge of the loft bedroom that had sold her and Gil on this house and opened the curtains that looked down into the living space. Greg was in the kitchen, watching the carafe fill. The room was lit by a dim bulb over the wet bar and half-open curtains.

She wondered when night became easier to face than day. Despite working graveyards most of her adult life, Sara loved sunlight. Loved that it chased the shadows from the corners. But the night shifts felt like some twisted version of karmic intervention. She was a foster kid who had survived, who thrived, and so she was always to be reminded that the darkest times of night were not for her to shy away from. She cherished the concept of daylight, but more often than not, found the world far too bright beyond the shade of her blackout curtains. Since that phone call she’d made the mistake of answering at work, since that morning when she’d fled the lab only to be blinded by the sun in her tears, she’d faced daylight with the same reticence that she approached decomp. Daylight wasn’t any safer than night.

Since that call, the weeks had ticked slowly by, turning into long months. Oh, she’d seen him. Unbeknownst to the team, she’d seen her estranged husband. The heartbreaking trip to Spring Training in Arizona, the surgery to remove the cysts from her ovaries, the forensic conference, the stopover in San Francisco while she testified. Life kept putting the two of them back together again and every time the door closed behind him, the pain only got worse.

“I’m too young to sleep alone, Gil,” she’d finally said to him as he packed his bag in the room they’d ended up sharing at the forensic conference in August. It was the only time in their seventeen years together she’d made their age difference a negative thing and it felt like she’d been the one delivering the death nail to their marriage. He’d leaned against the door and stared at his feet before walking out without saying a word. She’d cried into her pillow and missed her morning workshop at the conference. The divorce papers had shown up two weeks later but neither of them yet had the heart to sign them. Legally separated. Not yet divorced. Somehow again in the limbo they’d muddled through for so long. Their conversations were sparse and cautious. They were both more hurt than either wanted to admit. He resented her love of Vegas and her newfound purpose in criminalistics. She felt he’d rather be anywhere but in the room with her. Yet still, the papers sat, in matching manila envelopes. They just weren’t ready for it to end. Resentment, after all, could be healed. Couldn’t it?

But, a week ago he’d emailed, a first step toward reconciliation, but she hadn’t found the energy to respond. In the harsh daylight of the middle of the day in September, she’d read the words through a haze of cigarette smoke and tears. Wasn’t that her choice to make? He wanted back into her life? He missed the home and the life they’d built together. He missed her. All her months of biting her lip and being strong and hating him for his choices that he felt were best for her and he dared, he dared to try and reconcile so easily? She’d rather be heartbroken than angry. She’d spent so much of her life being angry. Still, he brought it up, that bubbling feeling, that need to slam doors and scream and she wanted him here so she could throw his words back at him.

Eight years ago, a different path had opened for her. She’d seen Greg hold out his hand and she could have taken it. That night in her apartment after she’d been suspended, when he’d shown up with cheese pizza and beer and they’d sat on her floor with their backs against the couch and she’d told him about why it mattered so much to her when men hit their wives or mothers hit their children. They’d stared at each other in the light that peered in through the crack between her blackout curtains and his fingers had traced her cheek and she’d leaned in so close she could have kissed him. What path would that have opened up? Even now she could see how he looked at her, could feel how close he stood and a part of her wondered if he still harbored those feelings. Logic told her that finding out was the worst thing she could do.

Sara knew better than to turn to comfort in the arms of a coworker, but all her best friends were coworkers or scientists on the other side of the world and Greg was there and he’d always been there and what if he did feel the same way and if he did …

If he did, it wasn’t fair to lead him on.

But she kept waking up at the end of the day and finding him there on her couch. He wouldn’t even take the guest room, saying that sleeping in a room so full of books would only keep his mind reeling because he’d want to read everything. She’d come down the stairs to get her nights started and find Greg, having come in when she was asleep. More often than not he was awake, cooking or putting things away, but sometimes he’d be tucked under a quilt snagged from the guest room, his hair just messy enough in sleep to remind her of the days when they’d all been so much younger.

Since Nancy Brass had been shot and Ellie arrested, he’d been there every day when they weren’t working. Sara was surprised he wasn’t haunting Morgan’s couch, knowing that the two of them were as good of friends as any two people in the lab, but instead he made the drive to her place and slept on her couch. Had Morgan kicked him out? Told him she needed space? Sara didn’t mind. She was tired of time and space. She was tired of an empty house. She was tired of staring at pictures she still hadn’t taken down and working the now empty space on her ring finger. It wouldn’t be hard to put the ring back on, to feel that connection to Gil, but the pain was only worse when she wore it, when she felt the miles with every heartbeat, not just every breath. Gil hadn’t come to the funeral. She wondered if he and Jim had talked.

Sara sighed and kicked her body into gear. It was clear from the change in Greg’s posture that he’d heard her moving around. Not caring that she was dressed in her rattiest shorts and a tank top so threadbare it was see through, Sara walked down the stairs. Her sweater could protect her modesty, but she wasn’t sure she wanted it to. Part of her wanted to just kiss him, to take advantage of that door that had been opened eight years ago. She knew his hands were soft.

“You have a condo, Greg. You should sleep there.” Her voice was soft. When he turned to her, his eyes were red rimmed. “Greg?” She switched tactics, confused about the tears. “What is it?”

“Nothing. How are you?”

“Greg?” She put her hand on his bicep and he surprised her by pulling her into his arms and holding her tightly against him. “What is it?” She asked again, worried.

“I …” He pulled back and she tucked her sweater around her torso a bit more. Passing fantasies of his hands aside, she wasn’t ready to truly entertain the idea of seducing her best friend. She didn’t like the idea, didn’t like that it seemed she could only find love with others who shared her work and her space. She should have learned by now that criminalists were not her perfect fit. But who was? “I’m sorry. I keep invading your house,” he said.

“It’s okay.” She needed a cigarette but held off the nicotine push. He worried she smoked too much. She did smoke too much. “What’s going on?”

“Morgan …” he took a breath. The coffee pot gurgled its signal that it was complete and Sara claimed two mugs from the cabinet. He poured and she added a touch of sugar to the bitter liquid. “When Morgan was taken …” he sucked in another breath, “all I could think about was you. Which …” a storm crossed his features but Sara waited for him to sort out his thoughts. “It made me feel even worse that this member of our family was gone but all I could see was your face and that car in the desert. You weren’t even there. You were in San Francisco and you were safe but all I could think was that if we didn’t get her home then you wouldn’t come home and she was shot and both of you … Sara …” he looked at her. “The team is as much the only family I have as you.”

The world screeched to a halt and Sara glanced out the window that wasn’t blocked off by curtains, staring at the bright Nevada evening. In Boston, around the Harvard Campus, leaves would be turning gold and red and falling to the ground. Here, the light was flat and sunset ringed with sepia tones. Where was Gil tonight? She realized she had no idea.

Greg was in her personal space, his hand on her hip, and she turned and leaned into his body, refusing the tears that rose up in her chest. What would have happened with him? If he’d been the one nursing her back to health after Natalie, if she’d fled and left him instead of Gil? That was the kicker, she knew, that life would either be 180 degrees different or all too much the same. She’d still have had her breakdown. Her ghosts still would have chased her to hell and back. Would Greg have tracked her down in Costa Rica? Would she have run further, desperate to escape ghosts that still haunted her? That was the secret. One learned to live with their ghosts, not exorcise them.

He was close, too close, and she needed to pull away before their heads turned and their lips met and they went to a place that in a few hours they’d regret. She couldn’t do this, couldn’t hide, couldn’t reduce Greg to the much needed sympathy fuck her body ached for. In this time recovering from the emotional upheaval of Brass and Morgan she knew they were all seeking comfort. She couldn’t do this, couldn’t ruin this, even if she wanted it. She was too young to sleep alone, but Greg was too good to use simply for comfort.

Pulling back, she put her hands on his chest and met his eyes and not for the first time since her return to Vegas did she feel the line that separated their friendship from something so much more complicated waver. It was a line drawn in sand and ever changing with wind and rising tides and she had to step away before the water lapped her toes.

“Morgan is alive and healthy and I’m still here, Greg,” she said quietly.

“You came back,” he said. Silence settled on them while steam rose from cooling coffee mugs. “I asked you once,” he spoke, his hands still on her hips, “if six thousand miles was a good idea. You said so far so good. What about now, Sara? Was it so easy for him to walk away from you?”

Gil’s email raced through her mind, how much he missed her, how he wanted to try and reconcile and have a home again. She was so angry at him for pushing and pulling and expecting her to follow at his whims but only she knew how much this hurt him, that the one asking for the separation was often the one who hurt more than the one left behind. But still there was no ring on her hand and he was asking for the door to be opened not here in Vegas but from wherever he was in the world. Greg was in her kitchen, making coffee, sitting with her and not Morgan not because Morgan kicked him out but because this was where he felt he needed to be.

Where was Gil? She didn’t even know.

She’d had awkward moments with Sofia and lingering dinners with Doug and a couple of disastrous dates that only made her realize how terrible she was at all of this. Greg was here and willing and that … that was the problem.

She didn’t want to be his sympathy fuck any more than she wanted him to be hers.

Still, she wanted to kiss him, wanted to let him push her back against the wall and let thirteen years of questions and sexual tension explode. She wanted to know that if she did it, if she kissed him, they could still be friends and work together and no one would ever know. She wanted to go back eight years and let their lips touch because that was her window, that was her chance. Now, she could only step back and pick up her coffee mug and take a long drink. Greg took a seat at the table. They both stared out the window at the lengthening afternoon.


End file.
